At Home With Beatrice and Sidney Webb

I

To her Diary, on July 7, 1891, a couple of months after her engagement and a year and some weeks before her marriage, Beatrice Potter confided a survey of the possibilities of what she often calls ‘the firm of Webb.’ Like nearly everything she writes, it is unsparingly frank, and, in the circumstances, both illuminating and characteristic.

We are both of us second-rate minds, but we are curiously combined. I am the investigator and he the executant; between us we have a wide and varied experience of men and affairs. We have also an unearned salary. These are unique circumstances. A considerable work should result if we use our combined talents with deliberate and persistent purpose.

As an expression of opinion on the part of a woman presumably in love, — and that she was in love there is convincing ground for believing, — this is certainly unusual. As an affirmation of purpose, it is not less striking. Pleasure of a personal kind out of the new association she expected and she got; about this she says nothing. There was, in fact, no need to say anything. The point, for her, was that it, and the ‘unique circumstances’ that went with it, were there to be used, to produce a ‘considerable work.’ That was its justification and its end.

Sidney Webb, who says somewhere that he is ‘ not given to reflection,’— a process he distinguished with logical accuracy from ratiocination, — has confided to no one what his expectations were. They were almost certainly much simpler. He saw an enrichment of life and work through happiness such as he had never experienced. No need for him to admonish himself toward ‘deliberate and persistent’ action. That, with him, is native — with her, a fruit of the ‘intolerable toil of thought’ and the conscious discipline of a will and imagination that, even after forty years of purpose, still sometimes flash out rebellious, and justify Fabians of the more sober mental hue in feeling, under their admiration, that she is, somehow, somewhere, fundamentally ‘flighty.’ Did they understand or even guess how that tendency to flight into more skyey regions than he knew was just what fascinates him?

However that may be, two minds in as complete unison as it is given to human beings to know had laid down a plan of future action, and begun to work upon it, even before the deeds formally and finally constituting the ‘firm of Webb’ were signed and sealed.

The business of finding a home that would suit them had already been accomplished. They wanted a place that should be at once reasonably central, airy, sunny, big enough for their books and their secretary or secretaries, and within their means. About fashionable quarters and good addresses they cared not one jot. Nor did they care what anybody else thought. They had £1000 a year. It was enough; but, if it was to provide the things they thought really important, it would have to be carefully expended. High thinking must go with plain living. Unlike most people, the Webbs are parsimonious about small comforts for themselves, generous in gifts to others. Rent, for instance, was not allowed to consume too large a proportion of income.

Number 41 Grosvenor Road met their requirements. In the heart of London, the place, nevertheless, had the air of remoteness and inaccessibility that belongs to a spot conveniently reached only by walking or driving. The roadway was of course not trafficfree, even in the nineties, but in those days, before the ubiquitous motor, and above all before the motor lorry, it was relatively quiet, and at night absolutely so. They acquired a long lease, at an inclusive rental of £110, which was near enough to the tenth of income that was regarded, in those spacious days, as the proper proportion to be assigned, in a family budget, to house room. On number 41, even now that Grosvenor Road has had its identity merged in Millbank, a tablet will no doubt in due course be placed to tell succeeding ages that for well-nigh forty years the Webbs dwelt and wrought here.

Externally it is, it must be confessed, a distressingly ugly house, although the Virginia creeper has done its best to soften both its harsh color and its ill-proportioned shape. A bad specimen of an architecturally bad period, ornate outside and space-wasteful inside, it is showy without being dignified, and the lavish decoration accentuates the shoddy design. Tenants more indifferent to these aspects, however, could hardly have been found. The rent was right; the situation was right; the size was right; the number of rooms was right. They had agreeable neighbors.

II

The social side of 41 Grosvenor Road, which was to become so famous and was so important, did not come fully into play for a year or so. With skill and tact Mrs. Webb let that side develop slowly. They made no rush at people. That was not their way. Socially, as politically, the method of permeation was gradual, and carried through with the minimum of display.

It was as a workshop that they saw the house in the first instance. It was from that point of view that they rejoiced in the existence of a little room at the turn of the stairs, halfway up toward the long white-painted drawingroom. The drawing-room they furnished very simply, so that it could accommodate the maximum number of people, with plain matting on the floors, some plain chairs, and a number of by no means remarkable water colors (wedding presents, at a guess) on the walls. The little room they at once saw as the secretary’s den. It was lined with bluebooks — bluebooks which, despite the annual turnout on which Mrs. Webb, as a well-trained housekeeper, insisted, flowed over into the narrow hall and got mixed up among the coats and hats there; they also lined the walls of the long narrow double room on the entrance floor, which served at once as dining room and study for the partners.

I remember, on the first occasion on which I went to dine in Grosvenor Road, wondering, since it was one of those London houses whose anatomy one perceives at a glance, where the study was, and deciding that, for greater quiet, they must have converted some airy upstairs bedroom to that purpose. It was not so. Actually, they worked on the dining-room table. There, after breakfast had been cleared, they settled down; thence, at a quarter to one, on the entry of the maid to lay lunch, they removed themselves and their papers.

To me, at the time, it seemed an intolerable arrangement. To them it was not intolerable, and for an interesting reason. He deals with letters, reports, and documents so rapidly that his desk never has any papers on it. Whereas most of us glance at an Agenda or Report, coming by the post, and lay it aside for future study, make notes and have to keep them somewhere, his eye travels at an incredible speed over written or printed matter and records what he wants to retain indelibly on his memory. So, while the waste-paper basket bulged every morning, the files were not there. He once gravely offended a most important personage who brought him a solemn document to study by handing it back after the briefest and apparently most casual inspection. He had to prove — as he easily did — that he had mastered all that was in it, and a good deal that was not, before the personage was mollified.

Over and above this trait was the fact that both of them knew all that there was to be known about how to use a secretary. Paperasses such as had to be retained, — the piles of separate sheets on which the perfect note-taker, according to their technique, keeps his notes; the dossiers of all sorts that recorded results of investigations, — these lived not on their table but in the files in the secretary’s room. Each morning, therefore, their table was as fair and clear as that of a Minister of the Crown, or great captain of industry. The bigger the man, the fewer the papers.

A daily routine was ordered from the start. Very often, in these early days, their secretary, F. W. Galton, would arrive at Grosvenor Road for an eight-o’clock breakfast. That function rapidly dispatched, the three would sit round the fire with cigarettes while the table was being cleared, and the secretary would be instructed as to the course of the day’s work — where he should go for material, whom he should see, what he should prepare for them. Often this involved journeyings into the provinces. After he had spent some time in any centre, making preliminary surveys, the partners would go down for a week-end, or longer if necessary, to complete the inquiries and see key people on the spot. As a rule, however, when Mr. Galton went off, either to his den above or to the world without, they sat down to the table.

III

Among the services for which subsequent students are in their debt is the creation of a technique of social research. That was largely worked out at this period, to be employed by them ever after. Of it they give a most illuminating account in the Preface to Industrial Democracy (published in 1897). At this stage they were themselves doing most of the research underlying their two great books on Trade Unionism: taking the notes, studying the documents, making the interviews, which, for later books, were largely prepared by secretaries. Certainly no picture of their life at this or any other period can begin to be truthful which does not put work — hard, unremitting, regular, sustained, and often dull — in the forefront. No work of their kind but includes great stretches of sheer drudgery. Companionship sweetened this, but it was there; they faced it, and carried it through, day after day, week after week, year after year. The structures that they reared may be criticized from many points of view — never from that of shoddiness.

Work occupied every morning. In any work jointly done, there is an element of mystery; and perhaps the question, ‘How exactly do you divide it?’ is one that cannot be answered — least of all when between joint workers there is a complete sympathy. But on a normal morning, after their secretary had left them, they would together read the notes of interviews and visits, and the précis of documents, already made — made either by one of themselves or by the secretary. They read and discussed them. At a certain stage her eyes would light up. She would spring to her feet and pace up and down, waving her cigarette. ‘That implies . . .’ She would then start off on a chain of argument, he swiftly writing the while, using his matchless power of finding appropriate and exactly fitting words for what she was sketching out in broad and vivid outline. Any idea or general view thus struck out by either was subjected to an intensive mutual testing. Then, after thoroughly threshing it out together, they took it to be tried on others.

Among those others, Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas came first. Far from breaking up any of Mr. Webb’s old friendships, Mrs. Webb accepted them; and in the Fabian Quartette, Sydney Olivier having gone to Jamaica, she took his place, and the new four were well-nigh as inseparable as the old. Shaw, in particular, during the years between 1892 and his own marriage in 1898, spent practically every holiday with them, and was also constantly at Grosvenor Road. Shaw and Wallas read the proofs of Trade Unionism, when it had reached that stage; to Shaw, ‘our oldest friend and comrade,’ they express gratitude for doing a like service with regard to The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation, in 1923, ‘in the midst of a general election in which we were otherside engaged.’ At every stage, long before that, these two were taken into counsel, for argument, discussion, the most thorough sifting and testing of every view and point. So were many others, on specific points.

It is in an atmosphere of friendliness, of frequent cheerful open talk, of impassioned and never dreary preoccupation with their chosen piece of work, that one must see them, if one is to see them at all, in the early days at Grosvenor Road — and indeed throughout their lives. They took their work with them wherever they went, just as they talked about it, trying out their ideas, with everyone they met. When they left London for the country — generally Surrey — in the summer months, they changed the scene but not the occupation.

Of the life they lived when thus withdrawn, an amusing vignette is given by Shaw in a letter to Ellen Terry. He writes from Dorking, in May 1897, when he, his future wife (Miss Payne-Townshend), and Miss Beatrice Creighton (daughter of the Bishop for whom, while he lived, as for his widow afterward, Mrs. Webb had a particular admiration) were sharing a house there: —

I wonder what you would think of our life — our eternal political shop; our mornings of dogged writing, all in our separate rooms; our ravenous plain meal; our bicycling; the Webbs’ incorrigible spooning over their industrial and political science.

Bicycling was one of their great recreations in those days. They all bicycled ardently in the country; Mrs. Webb used also to ride in Battersea Park, in company with Charles Trevelyan and other active young politicians. It was apropos of this bicycling that, according to one of their intimates, Sidney was seen for the first time to be thoroughly flustered. Beatrice had a slight accident when thus riding, and was brought home in a cab, her blouse bespattered with blood. Then, for a moment, if only for a moment, he ‘went off the deep end.’

Shaw tells another story to prove that, unlike most of the ladies of his acquaintance, Beatrice was never in love with him. They were all three staying somewhere in the country, and in a shed attached to the house he discovered an authentic velocipede, such as he had never ridden. He brought it forth in triumph, Beatrice looking on, and tried to make it go, without success. At last he was driven to taking advantage of the fact that the lawn was arranged in a series of sharply sloping terraces. On the down grade the thing did go, only to collapse again on the flat, throwing him violently and suddenly to the ground, and bringing him, so he says, to within an ace of departure from this mortal scene at each essay. She, however, instead of sympathizing or showing any concern, laughed with delighted amusement. The sounds brought Sidney to the window; he looked out, inquired what was going on, and came running forth, intent on trying what his skill could effect. Whereupon Beatrice cried with insistent passion, ‘No, no, Sidney, you mustn’t!’ From which moment G. B. S. realized the bitter truth — or so he says.

Nevertheless, with native nobility, Shaw continued at the opening of each bicycling season to get out Sidney’s bicycle, as well as his own, and see that it was in order — an operation which his friend was incapable of performing for himself. Skill with his hands is no part of Mr. Webb’s equipment. Nor do most of those who know him believe that he is speaking the whole truth when, in Who’s Who, he puts down ‘walking’ as his recreation. He does walk — but his walking is part of the regimen of the regulated life.

IV

Of that regulated life, so definitely accepted and determinedly followed, the shape, in these early days, has a fairly simple outline. The mornings were devoted to common work. Lunch, more often than not, produced somebody, or several somebodies, — the number very soon grew, — to whom they wanted to talk, on whom they wanted to try out some idea connected with their work. Then, on five afternoons of the week for nine months of the year, he trotted off to the London County Council, of which he was a most active member for eighteen years.

She occupied herself variously. Perhaps some hours were devoted to that Diary she has kept all her life — the Diary which supplies the most vivid portions of My Apprenticeship and will, when it is published in full, be one of the great books. She went out to see her friends, or they came to see her. She might be rather too fond of trying to ‘arrange’ the lives of her friends; but her attachments were genuine, warm, and lasting.

If, as time went on, they tended to see more and more of the people who could be ‘useful,’ that was part of the price of the ‘life according to plan,’ to which they were committed. That plan, in its turn, gave to their existence so much of a uniform texture that one may well, here, try to see it as it was to be, in broad outline, throughout the best part of forty years.

So far as work went, they began as they meant to go on, and did go on. Their standard of work is tremendous. For forty years they have worked with a passion and at a pace that are a standing reproach to slackness, and influence, to some degree, everyone who comes in contact with them. In this there is no change between 1892 and 1933.

As time went on, the portion of their non-working hours devoted to a thoroughly planned sociability sensibly increased. Thus, if many of their later visitors would be hard put to it to give any picture, however rough, of the first-floor drawing-room, that is because it was likely to be too full of people for any of its non-human features to be discerned, and of people so varied and often so remarkable that no other impression but of them, and of the noise they made, could be registered. People met each other there who had never met before, and often never met again. From some point of view, or for some purpose, they were, at the moment, ‘key people.’ Some of them might be, to all appearance, unimportant; others were visibly terribly important — there they all were.

Everybody who is anybody in any of the multitudinous worlds that make up London (with the possible exception of the merely social) has been to the Webbs’, at some time or other. Mrs. Webb, says Mr. Wells, in that portrait which would be so much more brilliant if it were more accurate and less malicious, ‘got together all sorts of interesting people in or about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever easily met before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but whiskey and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade. Everybody was very glad indeed to come to that.’ They certainly were. And why not, one might ask.

At the same time, this point about the food deserves a word, since many visitors to number 41 did undoubtedly come away with the impression that they had not had enough to eat. Perhaps they had not, in those days when, by our slimmer standards, so many people ate too much. There also were stages when she was trying some new diet fad, and, of course, imposed it. That she knows better than other people what is good for them is the conviction of hers that has caused more trouble than any other. In general the food was very plain, and you took what was offered; there were no choices. Food undoubtedly figured in the chapter of economies. But my own impression is that, if there was nothing specially tempting either to eye or to palate about the table, the food was there. After all, Mrs. Webb retained the same two maids almost throughout her married life, and maids do not stay where there is not enough to eat.

Part, at any rate, of the reason why visitors felt hungry is that not only does she herself eat extraordinarily little (there are friends to-day who hold that, partly out of sheer ascetism, she starves herself), but both host and hostess eat extraordinarily fast, even when they are talking; so it often happened that plates were being cleared away before slower jaws had emptied them.

The time actually spent at table was cut to a minimum. They both wanted to be talking; that, rather than eating, was what meals were for. And the talk was not of the kind to assist digestion for the ordinary mortal.

V

It was good talk, no question about that; much better talk than is generally achieved when numbers of distinguished persons are assembled. It was about interesting topics, and had a strong feel of reality and central importance; something might even ‘come of it.’ Mrs. Webb in particular, if a poor listener, not only talks with keenness, freshness, a brightly personal approach, and, every now and then, a sudden swoop of positive intellectual brilliance, but she has a rare faculty for gathering a conversation together, bringing it to a point. If it failed of being the best kind of talk, the reason perhaps was that this ‘point’ was a little too obvious. It was all for something — not, as is the best talk, for itself.

The mere play of mind on mind is not one of their pleasures; nor was talk at their house, even when the company was intimate, of the kind to evoke those long pauses in which ideas, feelings, even aspirations, reverberate, and set up sympathetic echoes. They talk, as they walk, for a purpose. They collected people and talked to them. They tried out ideas on them. Sensitive interlocutors at times had the feeling that, their opinions or reactions once extracted, they were ‘placed,’ and, placed, were done with. To discover what they were like, in themselves, was no concern or interest of their host and hostess. They had got them classified; they ‘knew where they were’; as mere individuals, they did not signify. They were put down in a certain tabular column, and that was that. ‘People,’ she once remarked, ‘are really quite simple.’ Whether or no, they do not, as a rule, care to be thought so, or to feel themselves assigned to a category.

She, it is true, can at times talk nonsense, of a kind, and delights in gossip — mere gossip, stories about people. With a kind of ironic and slightly contemptuous interest, she keeps in touch with the follies of the world of Society, with a big S, the world she so definitely left. She also has a very strong feeling about conduct — a Puritan outlook on more things than mere eating and drinking; and gossip feeds this. Even here, however, an extrinsic interest can be sensed, behind her easy narrative flow: the stories are being arranged, like the people and the facts, into materials for judgment and classification; the thing, even at its apparent lightest, has an ulterior motive. ‘Deliberate and persistent purpose’ has, in fact, entered into their blood.

It is perhaps because this ulterior motive is too easy to perceive that the Webbs are not always as successful in conversion as, with their combined talents, they ought to be. But it is also the case that they are never out to ‘catch’ people unawares. Of course they did, again and again, impress their views on their colleagues and associates in common enterprises; for example, in 1894, Sidney was writing the Minority Report of the Labor Commission, presented over the names of Tom Mann and his associates, just as he was, in 1909, to write the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, to cite only two cases out of a long series. They not only talked with friends and allies; they talked with any and every possible or actual adversary who could be, at best, converted into an ally, or deflected from opposition, or, at worst, ‘sized up.’

Year in, year out, they gathered the bright young men, and, to a slightly less degree, the bright young women, just down from the universities or doing something interesting in some field or other in the Provinces or in London, or anywhere on the face of the globe. They gathered them in, mixed them, and ‘permeated’ them, in so far as they were capable of sustaining that operation. But entice them blindly into the Socialist fold they never did. On the contrary, at a certain point, they invariably put before the acolyte every difficulty — social, professional, and personal — that he might be going to meet. What did his wife think? Had he realized what such a step might mean professionally? Was his faith strong enough to sustain being laughed at? Through key people they certainly have, over the years, exercised a farreaching influence, impossible to measure or assess; the point to be made is that there is nothing Machiavellian about the process. It is, on the contrary, almost shamelessly open.

VI

Not only do they reënforce one another in an almost total incapacity to be bored either by people or by things with any bearing on their preoccupation; they are alike in an utter absence of secretiveness about it. This last quality — rare enough in writers and not common among politicians — is one of their outstanding characteristics. Neither can ever have known what it is to be afraid of testing an opinion by the utmost openness of discussion, nor has either ever had any impulse to keep hidden anything of public interest.

When they were on Trade Unionism, John Burns, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and a whole host of Trade Union leaders were constantly about the house; every point at issue was put to them. Employers and economists, so far as they could be got at, were treated in the same way. The book, when it came out, held neither surprises nor shocks for anyone concerned with its subject matter. It has been the same throughout their career. On Education, on the Poor Law, or Local Government, — as, much later, on Russia, — they never had anything ‘up their sleeves.’ All their results have always been presented, and designed to be presented, to the public.

Sometimes, it is true, public presentation is made by — and public thanks, if any, given to — somebody else. That never troubles them. They are as generous in giving as in taking. In all their work, they meet friend and enemy in the open, from the start. They read the manuscripts of other people, and they get other people to read theirs. They revel in critics on the hearth. Shyness, of any kind, is not in them. The one odd result is that they have been freely stigmatized as arch-plotters, simply because so many people have always known about their ‘plots,’ as when they were ‘working’ anything or anybody, or ‘ getting at ’ anyone.

Actually, they are planners rather than plotters, but the planned life is rare enough to seem to most people almost like a plot. That is, perhaps, the smallest among the sacrifices it exacts. Any form of life exacts some; of this, the major compensation was that it gave them the sort of freedom they valued. Have they not defined personal liberty as ‘the practical opportunity of exercising our faculties and fulfilling our desires’? They saw order, regulation, plan, in a word, as the road to this end for themselves. By adhering to their plan, they have worked ‘wonders,’ and do not wonder at them. They are not a marvel to themselves, and would not greatly care to be a marvel to others.

Immune, too, are they to many of the distractions which defeat the average worker in his striving for steady concentration. No inclination, with either, to sit too long over mere food and drink; no perilous questionings from the merely sensual man; no insistent calls from the purely æsthetic. By unnerving response to the simply beautiful they can rarely have been troubled; when the morning sun poured in at the windows of Grosvenor Road, making the water dance and the sky sparkle, they felt little nausea of the desk, no call to the open road. These immunities must have helped to make discipline lighter and easier. Yet no reader of My Apprenticeship can doubt that, in her case, some sacrifice was involved in accepting it, even as an act of deliberate choice.

Part of the price that had to be paid in accepting and sustaining their routine may be more obvious to their friends than to themselves. The things they have not got, which made it relatively easy for them to do it, have been cleverly pointed out again and again. Countless caricaturists, in word and in line, have made them, for our generation, the classic exemplars of a monumental industry purchased at the price of human charm. Although this cleverness is really too easy, its excuse is that they share certain common peculiarities; and that, as a couple, especially in days when they were younger, there was something about their aspect and their approach that can only be called funny.

This element leaped to life for the reader of a rhapsodic description, which must have deeply displeased them, made in the heyday of the Poor Law campaign by Alfred Ollivant. He spoke, there, of ‘ the Darkling Lady and her little Lord.’ The visible contrast between Beatrice — handsome, flashing, dominant, aggressively vital; swift and masterful in gesture both of mind and of body; an eagle among human birds — and Sidney — tiny, unassuming, soft, husky, and slightly lisping in utterance, glasses never secure on nose yet never taken off, a mere modest sparrow — this contrast could seem absurd did not the observer suddenly catch, in Sidney’s eye, a glint suggesting that he, too, sees what the observer is thinking: sees, and does not in the least mind. This fact, swiftly redressing the balance, makes the observer slightly hot under the collar.

VII

Set, as they have now been for so many years, against a chosen background of such strenuous and constant endeavor as is a challenge to average inconstancy of aim and slackness of action, they provoke those whom they thus shame. The easy retort has been to say that they have no souls. At some stage or other, the ascetic does paradoxically rouse the hedonist to such an accusation. Can it be sustained, in their case, except by leaving out most of the facts? That was, of course, the trick employed by Mr. Wells, and his New Machiavelli, written in 1911, not long after he had flounced out of the Fabian Society in a pet, is the one picture of the partnership that is familiar to the common reader. But Mr. Wells is here indulging a weakness for caricature; he leaves out the two major premises that have made the life according to plan possible and successful.

The first is the simple fact of mutual attachment. That the Webbs are, as are few, happy — this is the most obvious fact about them for anyone who knows them. Something deeper than cheerfulness and warmer than optimism surrounds them. Its warmth is its unmistakable note. Nonsense like E. T. Raymond’s ‘two typewriters clicking as one’ could only have been invented from reading. Here is not comradeship only, here is loving comradeship; and it is sheer blindness to refuse to see it merely because its form is odd.

When they were younger, what Shaw calls their ‘spooning’ embarrassed some of their friends; but behind it was a stuff which has securely stood the test of time. The one thing either of them really dreads is the possibility of separation. Could Sidney compound with the Deity, he would, so he has said more than once, gladly give up his one year of juniority in return for an assurance that when death comes to either it may come to both. They have their own quaint ways of expressing this close affection. Once, when they had as guests a young couple to whom they are much attached, they took them out for a walk. Sidney and the husband got on ahead. He looked back at the other two.

‘I can tell you what Beatrice is saying to your wife.’

‘Yes?’

‘She is telling her that we call marriage the waste-paper basket of the emotions.’

They waited for the ladies to join them. When they came up, they were asked what they had been talking about.

‘I was telling her,’ said Beatrice,

‘ that we call marriage the waste-paper basket of the emotions.’

With this premise of mutual affection, the second condition of success is closely associated. They are Socialists who have, with set intention, devoted their lives to the furtherance of their belief. They have a view of happiness radically connected with it. Take any view you like of the service actually rendered to humanity by the Webbs, it is yet impossible to deny that to render such service has been their steady, unswerving, and disinterested aim throughout. In its course they have had to meet the normal share of misunderstanding, of criticism, even of ridicule. Against resentment, against bitterness, against all the myriad forms of uncharitableness private and public, they have been protected by the integrity of their will to serve, and by the secure possession of their private talisman of affection. They do not mind what anyone says. They just go on with their work.

VIII

Cole once said, in a moment of not uncommon exasperation, ‘The worst of Webb is that he is permanent.’ Permanent, and in a sense not only a permanent challenge to hedonism, but a permanent question mark to the mind. For the plan does exact its price; something there is that is lacking. What is it? Partly, of course, all that is lumped together, vaguely and loosely, under the general vague head of ‘æsthetic values.’ A largish compartment of human experience, this — to some the most vital, that which gives significance to the rest. For them, in any serious sense, it is not there.

And there is something else, too, harder to get into words. When Mr. Wells’s egregious hero comes out of the house in Chambers Street, which is blatantly a picture of 41 Grosvenor Road, and leaves its ‘administrative fizzle’ to pass out into the London night, he is intensely aware, emotionally, of a quality in its obscure and deep pulsations that eludes the Webb thermometer — some element, irrational and yet passionate, in human creatures and in human existence which it does not register and cannot account for. Those who do leave it out may find living easier, yet they are ignorant of something the complete man must know.

One interrogates the story of the Webbs in an effort to track this blind spot down. The things left out, so far as one can give them names, are mainly painful. Neither has known either poverty or the grinding economic anxiety and strain that undermine confidence, as they undermine health. Since they discovered one another, neither has known any acute emotional stress, shock, or loss. Neither has any acquaintance with the acrid taste of failure, in the world’s esteem or in their own. Toil, sweetened by companionship, has been made easy by success. They have, throughout, been able to go their own way in freedom. Is it, perhaps, this relative ease of circumstances and of accommodation, this feeling one gets that the world’s woes, hard as they work to redress them, do not keep them awake at night, and that its more searching and tormenting problems remain largely unplumbed — is it this that gives to their touch a distinct flavor of dry unreality, and makes it natural for them to see people in categories and express them in institutions?

To define what is left out is as difficult as not to be aware of it. It is the standing puzzle about them, who are, otherwise, the least puzzling people in the world.